Chapter 100: Please Don’t
Tyler stared at the sphere of darkness hovering just above his palm, close enough that he could have sworn he felt something radiating off it, though nothing about it explained what that something was.
Surprise and confusion tangled together behind his eyes, refusing to resolve into anything he could name. At first glance it had looked like nothing more than a hole punched straight through the air itself, a gap of black that had simply appeared there, inches from his skin, without any warning at all.
Now, though, its edges had drawn themselves into something rounder, more deliberate, a sphere wrapped in a thin skin of shadow clinging close to its surface. Without any warning, it dropped.
It landed square in his palm, and his shoulders jerked upward on instinct, his whole body flinching back from the contact before his mind had caught up.
The moment his skin registered it, something in him recoiled, this didn't feel like anything he'd ever held before. It matched the size of a slime core almost exactly, but where a slime core always carried some trace of warmth or a faint chill, this held no temperature at all, no chill, no warmth, nothing his fingers could latch onto and name.
He could feel that he was holding it, the pressure of it against his palm, the curve of it fitting into the cup of his hand, but underneath all of that, something essential was missing, and its absence sat wrong in his chest.
His fingers closed slowly around it, and he drew his hand in toward his body. *Just what am I looking at?* He turned it, studying it in the low light.
He tilted the sphere in his palm, and the moment it rotated, the color shifted, so quick and so slight he nearly missed it. What had been a void, an absence with no depth to measure, nothing for his eyes to land on, resolved instead into a black he could actually perceive, thick and slick-looking, closer to oil pooling under lamplight.
The moonlight through the window caught along its curve, throwing a thin, gliding line of light across the surface, the same way it might slide off the polished toe of a boot.
"It's changed?" He tilted his head, watching the light shift as he turned his wrist.
Curiosity pulled a system panel up above the orb, but the word inside it hadn't changed at all.
[UNKNOWN]
This time, though, the border of the panel wasn't clean. Where every other panel he'd seen held its edges in straight, deliberate lines, this one's border jittered, jagged little breaks fracturing along its length like something underneath it kept slipping and catching itself again. "The system doesn't even seem to know what it is." He huffed a short breath through his nose. "So how am I supposed to—"
The rest of it died in his throat.
He closed both hands around the orb fully this time, feeling out its shape through his palms. There was solidity to it, but a hollow kind, like the outer shell held its form without anything dense enough behind it to fill the space. *This was clearly a slime core.* "But its weight..."
He lifted it, testing the heft of it in one hand, then bounced it lightly, feeling for what should have been there and wasn't.
It weighed less than a slime core by a wide margin. A slime core sat dense in the hand, packed solid the way a marble of glass would, no give to it and no air trapped anywhere inside. This felt closer to a hollow ball with nothing but air behind its skin, light enough that his hand kept expecting more resistance than it ever delivered.
He rose off the bed, the thought turning over as he stood. *I thought the system was about to shock me all over again. And it would've been because of this thing.* He turned the orb slowly between his fingers.
*Did the system glitch and make this by accident? It's not impossible. It already turns ore into ingots, crafts armor. Maybe this was just some kind of mistake.* He let the explanation settle into something he could believe.
After a short pause, he decided he was finished chewing on it. It was one more mystery tangled up in a system built out of them, and he'd get to this one eventually, the same way he'll work through the others.
He let it go, sending the thought to return it to his inventory the way he always did.
But nothing happened.
He stood there, quiet, the orb still resting in his open hand.
It wasn't going anywhere.
He tried again, his brow drawing tight with the effort.
Still, nothing answered him.
Something should have happened by now. He'd never had to try before, not really; sending something to the inventory had always come as easily as a breath he didn't have to think about, or a blink his eyes just performed on their own. Except this had always felt even easier than that, easier than anything that still required a body to do it.
Straining to force something into the inventory didn't even make sense as a concept. It had simply always happened before, no effort required at all.
*What's going on?* A panel rose in front of him, the text rendered in a hard, saturated red.
[THE ITEM IS HARMFUL TO THE SYSTEM. THEREFORE, IT CANNOT BE ACCEPTED. IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED THAT THE USER DOES NOT USE SUCH AN ITEM]
"What?" The word came out on a breath. The panel vanished, and he was left staring down at the small orb still sitting in his palm. *This thing harms the system? How? I didn't even think that was possible.*
The implications of it kept unfolding in his head, one after another. If the system could be harmed, did that mean it could be killed, erased, wiped clean the way anything digital could theoretically be undone?
He had no way to know for certain. But that warning, telling him plainly not to use the item,*Is that for my safety? Or is it for the system's?*
"What's even the harm in using this thing? It just looks like a round ball." He turned it over once more in his fingers. "It's not like I can swing it around or just throw—" He moved it out to his left as he spoke, demonstrating the harmlessness of the motion to no one but himself.
The orb answered him mid-swing. It shifted entirely in his grip, the change so sudden that his hand recoiled on instinct and let go, the object falling before he'd even decided to drop it.
It struck the floorboards and skidded, the sound of metal striking wood cracking sharp through the quiet room and rattling off the walls before it settled. Where the orb had been, a long black sword now lay across the boards, its dark blade catching a cold thread of moonlight along its edge.
*What the hell?* His pulse jumped hard in his throat.
"It changed again. Into a weapon?"
Another panel rose in front of him.
[DO NOT USE THIS ITEM]
The letters sat larger this time, thicker at the edges, the red behind them burning deeper than before.
*Again.* A slow chill worked its way down his spine, one vertebra at a time. "But why?" The panel disappeared, and he stood there looking down at the sword, weighing whether or not to touch it. He crouched slowly and closed his hand around the hilt, lifting it off the floor.
It came up weightless. He knew, logically, that he was holding a weapon, a solid length of forged metal, but his arm reported none of that. Just the same impossible lightness as before, like lifting nothing more than a hollow ball of air.
And yet, despite that, some certainty settled in his chest that had nothing to do with weight at all: this thing could cut.
The knowledge arrived without explanation, absolute all the same.
"How did it change into a sword?" He dragged his thumb along his jaw, turning the question over. He remembered the shape in his mind right before it happened, the image of a sword, the comparison he'd drawn between the orb and a blade without really meaning to.
The instant that image had sharpened in his head, the orb had already become it. That exact sword. He frowned, and another image surfaced behind his eyes, the iron sword he'd forged once before, and the blade in his hand responded immediately.
It shortened. The hilt reshaped itself, curving slightly upward at the guard, settling into the same proportions as the iron sword down to the angle of the grip, except the metal stayed black straight through, no trace of iron's dull grey anywhere on it. "Whoa." The breath left him in a rush.
*It changed again. Does it turn into anything I picture?* He pulled up another image, deliberately this time, and the blade folded itself into the shape of the Tearra Dagger sitting in his palm. A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth, and a short laugh slipped out before he could stop it.
Nervous and amazed all at once, the two feelings tangled together into something that, against every instinct telling him to be careful, felt genuinely thrilling.
[DO NOT USE THIS ITEM]
[DO NOT USE THIS ITEM]
[DO NOT USE THIS ITEM]
[DO NOT USE THIS ITEM]
[DO NOT USE THIS ITEM]
The warnings stacked one on top of the other, each carrying the same weight of insistence. "Explain why, so far this is a pretty good item." he muttered, and another panel answered him in its place.
[USER IS IGNORING ALL SYSTEM REQUESTS, DELIVERING PUNISHMENT]
"Huh?" The breath caught somewhere in his chest. That static feeling crawled back over his skin, prickling up his arms the same way it had before, and he knew exactly what it meant this time. He knew what was coming for him.
"All right, I'm sorry." The words cracked halfway through, his voice fraying at the edges.
Then the hilt trembled against his palm, a low growling vibration rolling out from somewhere deep inside the metal. The blade shook hard in his grip, violent for one full second, and then went still.
The panel vanished, and another rose to replace it.
[PUNISHMENT HAS BEEN MET WITH AN ERROR]
His heart hammered against his ribs. He looked down at the sword still resting in his hand, already certain the two were connected. "Just what is happening?" Another panel formed in front of him, the red gone now, replaced with a soft, steady blue.
[PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS ITEM]
His eyebrows rose. *Please?* This was the first time he'd seen the system reach for that word at all. Every message before this had come out flat, mechanical, stripped of anything that resembled asking. Watching it now, the shift settled into him slowly, the weight of just how desperate the system actually was pressing down behind his ribs. And under that same weight, his curiosity only pulled tighter, sharper, hungrier to know exactly what he was holding in his hand.